How does the event dispatch thread work?

Question

With the help of people on stackoverflow I was able to get the following working code of the simples GUI countdown (it just displays a window counting down seconds). My main problem with this code is the invokeLater stuff.

As far as I understand the invokeLater send a task to the event dispatching thread (EDT) and then the EDT execute this task whenever it "can" (whatever it means). Is it right?

To my understanding the code works like that:

1. In the main method we use invokeLater to show the window (showGUI method). In other words, the code displaying the window will be executed in the EDT.

2. In the main method we also start the counter and the counter (by construction) is executed in another thread (so it is not in the event dispatching thread). Right?

3. The counter is executed in a separate thread and periodically it calls updateGUI. The updateGUI is supposed to update GUI. And GUI is working in the EDT. So, updateGUI should also be executed in the EDT. It is why the code for the updateGUI is inclosed in the invokeLater. Is it right?

What is not clear to me is why we call the counter from the EDT. Anyway it is not executed in the EDT. It starts immediately a new thread and the counter is executed there. So, why we cannot call the counter in the main method after the invokeLater block?

import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.JLabel;
import javax.swing.SwingUtilities;

public class CountdownNew {

    static JLabel label;

    // Method which defines the appearance of the window.   
    public static void showGUI() {
        JFrame frame = new JFrame("Simple Countdown");
        frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
        label = new JLabel("Some Text");
        frame.add(label);
        frame.pack();
        frame.setVisible(true);
    }

    // Define a new thread in which the countdown is counting down.
    public static Thread counter = new Thread() {
        public void run() {
            for (int i=10; i>0; i=i-1) {
                updateGUI(i,label);
                try {Thread.sleep(1000);} catch(InterruptedException e) {};
            }
        }
    };

    // A method which updates GUI (sets a new value of JLabel).
    private static void updateGUI(final int i, final JLabel label) {
        SwingUtilities.invokeLater( 
            new Runnable() {
                public void run() {
                    label.setText("You have " + i + " seconds.");
                }
            }
        );
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SwingUtilities.invokeLater(new Runnable() {
            public void run() {
                showGUI();
                counter.start();
            }
        });
    }

}

Answer 1

You are actually starting the counter thread from the EDT. If you called counter.start() after the invokeLater block, the counter would likely start to run before the GUI becomes visible. Now, because you're constructing the GUI in the EDT, the GUI wouldn't exist when the counter starts to update it. Luckily you seem to be forwarding the GUI updates to the EDT, which is correct, and since the EventQueue is a queue, the first update will happen after the GUI has been constructed, so there should be no reason why this wouldn't work. But what's the point of updating a GUI that may not be visible yet?

Answer 2

If I understand your question correctly you're wonder why you can't do this:

public static void main(String[] args) {
    SwingUtilities.invokeLater(new Runnable() {
        public void run() {
            showGUI();
        }
    });
    counter.start();
}

The reason why you can't do it is because the scheduler makes no guarantees... just because you invoked showGUI() and then you invoked counter.start() doesn't mean that the code in showGUI() will be executed before the code in the run method of the counter.

Think of it this way:

• invokeLater starts a thread and that thread is schedules an asynchronous event on the EDT which is tasked with creating the JLabel.
• the counter is a separate thread that depends on the JLabel to exists so it can call label.setText("You have " + i + " seconds.");

Now you have a race condition: JLabel must be created BEFORE the counter thread starts, if it's not created before the counter thread starts, then your counter thread will be calling setText on an uninitialized object.

In order to ensure that the race condition is eliminated we must guarantee the order of execution and one way to guarantee it is to execute showGUI() and counter.start() sequentially on the same thread:

public static void main(String[] args) {
    SwingUtilities.invokeLater(new Runnable() {
        public void run() {
            showGUI();
            counter.start();
        }
    });
}

Now showGUI(); and counter.start(); are executed from the same thread, thus the JLabel will be created before the counter is started.

Update:

Q: And I do not understand what is special about this thread.
A: Swing event handling code runs on a special thread known as the event dispatch thread. Most code that invokes Swing methods also runs on this thread. This is necessary because most Swing object methods are not "thread safe": invoking them from multiple threads risks thread interference or memory consistency errors. 1

Q: So, if we have a GUI why should we start it in a separate thread?
A: There is probably a better answer than mine, but if you want to update the GUI from the EDT (which you do), then you have to start it from the EDT.

Q: And why we cannot just start the thread like any other other thread?
A: See previous answer.

Q: Why we use some invokeLater and why this thread (EDT) start to execute request when it's ready. Why it is not always ready?
A: The EDT might have some other AWT events it has to process. invokeLater Causes doRun.run() to be executed asynchronously on the AWT event dispatching thread. This will happen after all pending AWT events have been processed. This method should be used when an application thread needs to update the GUI. 2

Answer 3

What is the EDT?

It's a hacky workaround around the great many concurrency issues that the Swing API has ;)

Seriously, a lot of Swing components are not "thread safe" (some famous programmers went as far as calling Swing "thread hostile"). By having a unique thread where all updates are made to this thread-hostile components you're dodging a lot of potential concurrency issues. In addition to that, you're also guaranteed that it shall run the Runnable that you pass through it using invokeLater in a sequential order.

Then some nitpicking:

public static void main(String[] args) {
    SwingUtilities.invokeLater(new Runnable() {
        public void run() {
            showGUI();
            counter.start();
        }
    });
}

And then:

In the main method we also start the counter and the counter (by construction) is executed in another thread (so it is not in the event dispatching thread). Right?

You don't really start the counter in the main method. You start the counter in the run() method of the anonymous Runnable that is executed on the EDT. So you really start the counter Thread from the EDT, not the main method. Then, because it's a separate Thread, it is not run on the EDT. But the counter definitely is started on the EDT, not in the Thread executing the main(...) method.

It's nitpicking but still important seen the question I think.